Friday, August 11, 2017

Don't let the year above fool you, peeps. This is the pilot episode of Hoppity Hooper, four years before the series was finally picked up by ABC.

"Hair Tonic" establishes the basics on our protagonists, although Waldo Wigglesworth (Hans Conreid), a very sly fox, is actually a con man, aided by his simple-minded, bugle-playing assistant, Fillmore (Alan Reed). The two meet up with Hoppity (Chris Allen) in the frog's home while on the run from the police.

As we've previously discussed, when the series was picked up, Reed had moved on to The Flintstones (and his Fillmore does have a bit of Fred Flintstone to him, doesn't he?), so Bill Scott (Bullwinkle) took over as Fillmore. Waldo passes himself off as Hoppity's "long lost uncle" in order to gain Hoppity's confidence.....

Scott, of course, had plenty of time on his hands, as The Bullwinkle Show had ended, and Bullwinkle was only being used for commercials, as we showed yesterday. Unfortunately, there hasn't been as much of a call for Hoppity to return, unlike Bullwinkle, Peabody & Sherman, and Dudley Do-Right, to name a few.